No abstract

Herb processing is a typical pharmaceutical preparation process for traditional Chinese medicine. After processing, its clinical applications and pharmacological effects vary greatly, which is most commonly attributed to the changing chemical properties between raw herb and processed products. In this work, a total of 53 chemical compounds were detected, among which 17 compounds were identified as discriminatory chemicals between raw and wine‐processed Scutellaria baicalensis, and 10 components were identified as chemical markers with a cumulative content contribution of 88.75%. In addition, this work revealed that the best wine‐processed time was 18 min by investigating the changes of chemical markers in S. baicalensis during processing. This work demonstrated that ultra‐performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry coupled with multiple statistical strategies is an effective approach for screening and identifying discriminatory chemical markers in complex traditional Chinese medicine.

Process design grants the quality connotation to products. This paper was to investigate the correlation between changes of chemical fingerprints of Andrographis Herba preparation and its pharmacological activity, and set up the bridge between key process and quality attributes. By referring to the preparation process of Andrographis Herba. preparation (extracting-concentrating-drying-granulation), HPLC fingerprints were employed to determine the difference of the effective materials of the intermediate micro components. Cluster analysis results indicated that the extraction link had great influence on quality connotation variation of Andrographis Herba preparation. The pharmacological activity of various intermediates was continuously decreased in the models of DPPH antioxidant activity and LPS-induced anti-inflammatory activity in mice peritoneal macrophages. Traditional high temperature treatment process was detrimental to its clinical effect from the curve equation between the key process parameters and pharmacodynamic activity. Partial least square (PLS) was used to construct spectrum-efficiency model equation, and it was verified that this equation could accurately predict the relationship between fingerprints and pharmacological activity, which would facilitate the subsequent evaluation of quality attributes and provide scientific basis for further quality control of the whole process.